What komponisto said. Also, we should expect to find an extremely adorable common ancestor.
I don’t see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don’t , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call “cute”. Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn’t imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally.
On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren’t- that for human’s cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren’t much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn’t expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.
I don’t see how this follows at all. Either cuteness and baby look manage to converge over the lifetime of a reasonably long-lived species or they do not. If they do we should expect our own babies or at least those of the most recent long-lived ancestor species to look cuter than the cuteness originator. If they don’t , presumably because cuteness is difficult to fine-tune, there is no particular reason to think the cuteness originator achieved a higher conversion than more recent species. Instead the cutest species should be one with both long time to evolve to meet maximum cuteness and few evolutionary constraints that limit cuteness.
All that is right. But if indeed bunnies are cuter than babies it suggests that the ancestor you describe is a common one. It would be surprising if the ancestors of bunnies had diverged from this cuteness pattern and then returned to it (especially since we seem to think that the more dependent variable is our psychological reaction not the physical features that we call “cute”. Thus the prediction.
The cuteness originator being a common ancestor of all species that value cuteness doesn’t imply that it achieved particularly high cuteness. Suppose that the cuteness ideal is essentially invariant (e. g. changing our idea of cuteness to include long noses would be extremely difficult and pretty much require reinventing cuteness from scratch), and valuing cuteness has been originally selected for because the babies of the cuteness originator just happened to be cute enough for cuteness valuation to be an evolutionary advantage. Successor species to the cuteness originator have the same cuteness ideal, and many of them have even cuter babies, because greater cuteness is advantageous and they had more time to evolve it. If the cuteness ideal is hard to change there is no reason to think that it was a perfect match originally. On the other hand, if the cuteness ideal is easy to change there is no particular reason to think that we still retain the original ideal.
All of this assumes that cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features are being selected for over other traits. But part of the original comment was that they weren’t- that for human’s cuteness is as much a legacy as anything else.
It only assumes that they weren’t much more strongly selected for originally than they are now, lack of selection is just a special case of cuteness matching being hard. You wouldn’t expect there to have been a perfect match between cuteness sensing and cuteness causing features unless it had been selected for, so expecting the commom ancestor to be exceptionally cute implies sufficiently strong selection then, but not now or in between.